Soldier Girls (50 page)

“Let me see your weapon,” he said.

She handed it to him out of the truck's window. He dropped the magazine, unchambered a round, put it on safe.

“You got this now?” he asked. “You had one in the chamber, Desma.”

It had all happened so fast. Sky, smoke, dirt, getting felt up by the medic, trying not to shoot up a tour bus. She could have shot herself by accident on the ride home. Or someone else. When the convoy got back on the road, Stoney resumed his place in the turret. He had been maybe ten yards from the blast, and must have gotten rattled around, but he resumed his job as the lead scout's gunner. When they reached Speicher, everybody from the two scout trucks went to the hospital. Stoney and his team had concussions, but the doctors let them go after several hours. Desma, Charity, and Brandon Hall they kept for most of the night. Desma was wearing a neck brace and Charity was wearing a neck brace and there was a television set playing something stupid. Desma wanted a cigarette badly, but the nurse said she was not allowed to go outside. The doctor who had examined them conferred with a doctor in Balad by telephone—and then a doctor in Germany. BB had hit his head pretty hard on the .50-caliber, and Desma and Charity appeared to have hit their heads on the roof of the ASV. Desma had also wrenched her right shoulder, after her arm had gotten stuck inside the steering wheel. The bomb had been a big one, and they had been right on top of the blast—maybe ten feet away, according to the doctor's note. All three of them kept failing the MACE test. The concussions they had were severe and the doctor considered whether to evacuate the three soldiers out, but finally he let them go at 2:00 a.m.

Stoney, Ford, and Angry Beaver had stayed at Speicher to find out what happened, and they drove everyone back to Q-West the following day. The medics at Q-West gave Desma shots of a synthetic opioid pain reliever called Tramadol, as well as a migraine medication called Imitrex. When the Tramadol and the Imitrex wore off the pain in her head was astounding. Desma started working at the motor pool, sending trucks with broken air-conditioning out for repair, tracking where the vehicles went on the military's vehicle maintenance software. Or she took naps, watched TV, sold her shit, packed. The silver box was her
last mission. The medics were having trouble suppressing the blinding headaches that she, Charity, and BB were experiencing, and nobody thought it was a good idea for them to go back out in an ASV. It felt like a demotion, and Desma missed hanging out with Stoney. At the same time, whenever she got behind the wheel of a vehicle—even just to drive across the post—she fought a boiling anxiety. Desma felt ashamed about not running more missions, but then a convoy returned after hitting another bomb, and she heard Mancil Smith slurring his speech as though he had suffered a stroke. It was the ninth IED blast Mancil had experienced—his fourth during this tour. One bomb had been enough for her. She was ready to go home.

Stoney was back out on the road, like all the guys from the lead scout truck. On the drive back to Q-West, he had given Desma a hard time.

“You ran that shit over,” Stoney said. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“I didn't do it on purpose,” said Desma. “It was there. We got close. We got closer.”

“Horseshoes and hand grenades,” said Stoney.

It was the name of a song they both liked by Green Day.

“Roadside bombs,” answered Desma. She shrugged at him.

To the end, Desma maintained that sort of attitude—casual, no exterior sign of distress. It was how you were supposed to behave if you were a soldier. In truth, she had been terrified that she might have killed him. She did not admit this out loud, but she thought Stoney was right—she had run that shit over. When a bomb had tried to get Stoney, he had dodged it, and she had heard the triumph in his voice when he had yelled, “Missed me, motherfucker!” But she had not dodged her bomb, and she had not gotten to yell that the enemy had missed. “And it was my fault,” Desma would say later. “I hit it. I hit that bomb. I didn't try to hit that bomb, but I was driving. And I was the one who ran over it.” She harbored a smothering sense of culpability.

Earlier that summer, Colonel Agron had come to find Debbie Deckard. He knew that she had trained with a crew that was doing convoy security with the 139th, and he had just heard some bad news. A bomb had gone off in Mosul. It wasn't the biggest improvised explosive device that the 139th had encountered, but it had detonated less than one hundred
feet away from the truck that contained the two young men Debbie had trained with back in Georgia—Selby and Boone—as well as the young man whose job she had taken—Sam Caulfield. Selby, Boone, and Caulfield had been in a convoy along with another soldier in the 139th, and the other soldier had seen the initial charge go off. “IED! IED!” he had yelled frantically over the radio. “Where?” Selby had asked. Then there was a rumbling boom. Everybody in the 139th had laughed about that exchange, back at Q-West: IED! Where? Boom. It was like a joke with the perfect punch line, they told each other. You had to laugh or you would fall apart.

The three soldiers had all gotten concussions. “They got rattled around,” Colonel Agron said to Debbie. “The young kid whose job you took, he was driving. It knocked their heads around a little bit. But they are going to be okay.”

Later, the three young men had stopped by to see Debbie. They just wanted to see her, they said. Just wanted to drop by, just wanted to say hello. Yeah, they had gotten hit; no, it wasn't a big deal, they were all fine. They had been given three weeks off, before they had to go back out in a convoy. They were back on the road now.

Then Colonel Agron came to find Debbie again. A big bomb had gone off down around Baiji, he said. Brooks and Elliott had been hit. Of course they were going to have some time off for evaluation, but they were all right. He thought she would want to know.

And she did. She did want to know. For the rest of the time that she spent in Iraq, however, Debbie frequently reflected about the fact that Sam Caulfield had been driving a truck while she was sitting in the chair that had once been his, safely behind bulletproof glass. She was supposed to have been inside that truck, and instead he had taken the thump of the IED. Later she would say that when she had gotten the news about those two IED blasts, involving two sets of people she had known, she had felt cheated. “I mean, that sounds like a weird thing to say, but not really cheated in a bad way, just cheated like maybe I should have been there,” she would say. “Maybe I could have controlled it and I didn't. You know, he is young. Or maybe I could have shared that with them. So not cheated in a bad way, but, you know, I wasn't part of that. I mean, there's nobody in the world that wants to be in a
vehicle that's hit by an IED. But you feel, well, I would have been there.” And what she meant was she
should
have been there. It would chew Debbie up for years, the idea that Caulfield had taken a blast that was meant for her. The bomb had had her name on it, and there had been some awful mistake, and the wrong person had gotten blown up in her stead. She felt that way all over again as soon as Agron told her about Desma.

A
FTER SHE MOVED
to Denver, Colorado, in February 2008, Michelle waited impatiently for her battalion to return from Iraq and watched her new home get turned upside down by politics. In August 2008, Denver was hosting the Democratic National Convention. The Democrats had chosen to hold their convention in Colorado for strategic reasons, as the general election looked as though it would swing on what transpired in a few states, and Colorado had gained prominence as one of them. Tickets to hear Senator Barack Obama speak were so coveted that his handlers moved his speech to the Broncos' football stadium to accommodate a larger crowd. Vehicles full of law enforcement officers patrolled the city in droves to quash any disruptions. On August 24, 2008, Michelle wrote in an email to Debbie Deckard:

Hope everything is going well for you. It's DNC time here in Denver, it's gonna get crazy! Police everywhere, with HUGE billy clubs. Ready to crush protestors for exercising their First Amendment Rights! Holy cow, I've never seen anything like this. I'm hoping the anarchists take over the city . . . well . . . kind of.

Since Michelle had left Afghanistan, Akbar Khan had continued to work as a translator for the US military. Akbar had gone ahead and married his first cousin, and they now had a child. Afghanistan still did not
have a viable economy, however, and Akbar hoped to parlay his military connections into a better life. That September, Michelle received an email from Akbar saying he had made it safely to the United States. He was staying with a friend in Lexington, South Carolina, and had just applied for a Social Security card. He wanted to find a job and save some money. Akbar had left his wife and son back in Afghanistan and was planning to send for them after he got established. He hoped to see Michelle soon. On September 17, 2008, in an email with the subject line “BEST DAY EVER!” Michelle broadcast the news to Debbie, Desma, Patrick, and George Quintana, saying, “Akbar is in the States! WHOOOO!!!!!!!!!!” She wondered if they might be able to pool their money and pay for Akbar to travel to Indiana to celebrate Christmas. Everybody who was serving in Iraq would be home by then, and Michelle wanted them all to be together. GQ had just gotten word of another deployment, however, and replied morosely, “What LUCK, He's in NC [
sic
] and I'm leaving back to Asscrackistan.”

Several days later, Michelle turned twenty-six. In lieu of a gift, Desma contributed $100 to a nonprofit that provided mentoring to at-risk youth. “Holy cow, Desma, thank you so much!” Michelle wrote. On her birthday, Michelle and Billy rented a pair of scooters and rode up the scenic back roads around Long's Peak, one of the best-known fourteen-thousand-foot mountains in the Rockies. “It was so exhilarating and beautiful—I'd love to have some land up there someday,” Michelle wrote to Desma. “We headed back towards Boulder after that, stopping in Lyons for some yard sale-ing and a gigantic lunch at Oskar Blues Brewery, home of Dale's Pale Ale, one of my favorite beers.” While they were checking out the yard sales, Michelle heard her cell phone ring but she let the call go to voice mail. Michelle cried when she listened to the message—it was Debbie, calling from Qatar. She had remembered Michelle's birthday in the middle of a deployment.

Debbie had flown to Qatar for a long weekend. The dust storms had been terrible, and her departure had been delayed repeatedly because of high winds and bad visibility. Shortly before she had left, a contractor for the Department of Defense had asked her out for coffee. They had talked until 5:30 a.m. He was married but they were both lonely.
Nothing physical happened; it was just remarkable to find someone with whom she could have a real conversation. Right after that, another Turkish young man had attached himself to Debbie. “These young Turkey boys must like older women,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “It's flattering. At 56 I just see nothing very attractive when I look in the mirror.” With only a few more months to go, Debbie was wondering about the meaning of the year she had spent in Iraq. “I would have liked to have done something more significant,” she wrote. “But just being here is probably enough. . . . If it helps at all for my grandkids future then my small part will be worth it.”

In Qatar she noticed all the ways in which Camp As Sayliyah had changed during the three years since she had last been there. At the Top It Off Club, the proprietors had added a karaoke machine and bowling lanes. Regulations governing the use of alcohol were just as strict as before, though: only three drinks a night. Soldiers desperate to guzzle more were paying cash to anybody with unused drink tickets, and by the end of the night it was a seller's market. “People were charging $20 to buy a $5 beer,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “I would of given mine away if I wasn't a lush.”

The soldiers who belonged to the 113th Support Battalion had been told only that their deployment would conclude sometime at the end of November. Michelle had identified several cabins in a state park in Brown County that would be large enough to hold the whole group—Patrick and his wife, Desma and Charity, Debbie and Jeff, Will and Linda, herself and Billy, and maybe Akbar Khan. Throughout October and November she sent a flurry of emails about the cabins to Debbie and to Patrick's wife, Beth. Separately, Michelle and Debbie exchanged other emails in which they worried about Akbar, who was having trouble finding work. Debbie wrote to him from Iraq:

Hi Kiddo

Michelle says things are going a little rough. I'm sure you knew it would be a little difficult, but I know you are a strong person so don't give up. . . . Sometimes things just take a little longer than we want but that doesn't mean that it won't work.
I know between me and Will you have a place to stay at least in Indiana. Michelle is good at finding info so with her help we will figure out something.

Try not to get to discouraged and give yourself some time. You have all of us that love you lots and want to help as much as we can.

Hopefully we will all be together in December when [we] return.

Love ya

Mama Debbie

Once again, Michelle decided to eschew both major party choices in the upcoming presidential election. “Hi my wonderful friends that are coming home soon!” she wrote to Desma, Patrick, and Debbie on October 16, 2008. “I realize that you have been missing all of the political action while you are serving, and are probably being subjected to mass amounts of propaganda that holds no truth whatsoever.” Michelle set them straight. “The American People have been tricked into thinking we must choose between two candidates: both of which stand with corporate interests and have no balls to do what is right for the people of this country. So I thought I'd let you know that Ralph Nader is running again, and I'm voting for him. Come on, you know I'm not stupid. I know he's not going to win. But here's why I'm voting third party: if any candidate receives 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election, they are entitled to public election funding in the next race.”